


Bright by scarredsodeep

by scarredsodeep



Category: AFI
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, M/M, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-28
Updated: 2012-07-28
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:01:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3097451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam's been watching him all year and they haven't spoken yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bright by scarredsodeep

**Author's Note:**

> Guys! Here is this thing!
> 
> It is not very long and the ending is not my best but it was brought to my attention today that I've usually started something big by this time of year, so I pulled this piece out of my hard drive where it has been languishing. It is not big, but I am working reasonably hard on something I think you'll like, if I can get it off the ground.
> 
> In the meantime I hope you like this! See you soon?

Bright, sharp and brittle, he was all edges. Someone to be handled carefully, if at all, and never held too tightly. Anyone who came too near reeled away bleeding. You didn’t get the impression that he enjoyed it, but he was nonetheless off-putting—dangerous.

Adam had been watching him for a long time. A year to the day, specifically. If Adam pushed his chair back as far as it could go while still remaining plausibly in front of the computer, and leaned back, he could just peer out of his cubicle and into Jade’s. He tried to justify this behavior, but was no longer able to. It had been a year: he was officially not the new guy anymore. If it was fact-finding, if it was simple fascination, if it was anything remotely defensible—well. Surely they’d have spoken by now.

Not that they had never spoken, of course. There had been polite greetings in the elevator, lukewarm smiles over lunch trays, and all the copy room niceties had been observed. But Adam had effectively been the man’s neighbor for a year—which came out to, what, almost _three thousand_ hours, sitting near enough to eavesdrop on Jade’s phone calls without so much as a ‘big plans for the weekend?’. Adam had no idea if Jade had a middle name, or a personal life, or any interests to speak of. He didn’t know where Jade went after work, if he had a family, kids, if he watched football. The goddamn Iron Curtain had come down thirty seconds after their formal introduction, and to this day all Adam knew about him was his name, the location of his cubicle, and that he was beautiful. (Adam also knew that he kept his voice maddeningly low-pitched when he made phone calls, that he dressed well, that he had been late on the mornings February 15th and June 3rd, and that no one ever lingered outside his cubicle to chat. But that was the sum total of the intel he had gathered these last 365 days.)

Thinking that reminded Adam to factor out weekends. He ran the calculation quickly in his head and revised—two thousand and eighty-eight hours, roughly. Which was not much better.

What Adam liked best about Jade was the flint in his eyes, glittery and cold, completely offsetting the warm smatter of freckles across his nose. He didn’t see much of the eyes, though—if he leaned back far enough to be at serious risk of tipping over backwards, he could get almost all of Jade’s profile. He had cultivated passing affection for glimpses of Jade’s neck, shoulders, and back, and always admired the fresh clean line of new haircuts.

Of course, he was also rather fond of the sex.

The Christmas party. Adam had still been ostensibly new, then: a fall hire, Christmas fell during his third month with the company. He knew enough names to float through the crowd from conversation to conversation, and stopped to share champagne flutes with a few clusters of close acquaintances. He lingered a while between the hors d’oeuvres table and a group of coworkers he semi-regularly went to a sports bar with when there was a game, and was warmly invited to a tentative Superbowl party. He complimented the CEO’s wife on her snug red velvet cocktail dress, and shook his supervisor’s hand and made all the appropriate noises. He hadn’t been comfortable, exactly, but he _had_ been getting drunker, and the evening was a merry one. He’d been watching Jade surreptitiously, laughing and flirting and being generally good-looking and charismatic and deadly, but every time Adam made up his mind to approach him, his throat became suddenly, unaccountably dry, and he was obliged to seek out another pretty, sparkling flute of champagne to moisten it.

He’d been on just such a mission when glasses all around him began to chime, and the CEO made his way to the little stage the jazz ensemble was set up on and began a toast. One of Adam’s football friends elbowed him and told him that gifts would be dispensed at the end of the toast, and that he’d heard this year it was watches. All faces turned towards the stage, and conversations died away into rustling and murmurs as the man spoke. That’s when Adam felt the eyes burning into him. He turned his head to see, from across the room, a dark, drawn face lit by glittering chips of flint. Jade’s eyes, on him. Adam immediately began to feel dizzy. He wondered distantly how many of those slender little flutes he’d sucked down, exactly. The eyes blazed into him, _ate_ into him. He could feel them burning, feel the skin singing where they lingered. And then Jade turned and walked away—away from the ring around the stage, away from the party, out into the dark and silent vacancy of floor twenty-nine. Adam was, for a moment, paralyzed: was he meant to follow? Surely not. Surely it was just a cursory meltingly-intense-stare from a man he’d made eye contact with on exactly two prior occasions. Surely—

Adam’s feet carried him where his mind would not. He passed off his drink and muttered something incoherent about a bathroom and lurched away from the crowd, in the direction Jade had gone. He ventured into the labyrinth of cubicles of twenty-nine, different enough from his own floor to be entirely disconcerting and taking on a ghostly quality in their stillness. The overhead lights here had been extinguished; the windows let in only a smear of skyline brightness and feeble, watered moonlight. Jade was nowhere in sight. He had lost him. Adam began to feel embarrassed, his face far too warm. He should get back to the party. Jade had probably gone to _actually_ use a bathroom. He felt like the biggest fool to ever live.

“In here,” came the voice, from the shadowed recesses of a supply closet. Adam’s heart exploded in his mouth, filling it with iron and blood and panic and desire, and he stepped into the engulfing shadow without question. “Wh—” he asked, before a hand cupped his jaw and lips descended on his own, and he was silenced. The kiss was savage, and he returned it with the same ferocity, much as any animal will struggle when it feels jaws close around its neck. Sliding, sucking, soft wet sounds, and it broke gasping. He could just make out Jade’s eyes in the dark, cruel sparks reflecting back at him. Jade showed his teeth, not entirely unlike smiling, and this time when Jade kissed him his hand closed around Adam’s tie, tugging, tightening. At first Adam thought Jade meant to strangle him, and didn’t mind it; but breath failing and heart bursting, Jade’s long fingers slipped into the knot, teased it free. Then his neck was bared and he felt teeth on it, and breath, and tongue—and then his shirt was slipping down his arms and to the floor, puddling atop Jade’s own. Belts and lips and biting, licking, pulling, pale skin and ilium and sharpness, splintered, and breathless, voiceless, fucking. Adam wanted to scream but could not make a sound. Time was timeless, translucent, silent and sweaty and grey, slipping over and through. The world was bodies, bodies, two and one at once, then two again. Just two.

They dressed in silence. Adam’s legs shook so he could barely stand. Jade left first; when he was gone, Adam had allowed himself to collapse against the closet’s shelves, daring at last to gasp for breath.

That was the first time.

Since, Adam had learned a better grasp of the rules. They hadn’t been specified, exactly, and as far as he could tell the intervals between _encounters_ were not punitively spaced or in any way correlated with bad behavior; but nonetheless Jade’s disapproval was deafening in his silence. That was, of course, the most important rule. Words were superfluous to the things they did together. Vocal emissions were tolerated only when driven by necessity, at the zenith of passion. Beyond that, there was very little eye contact; and a complete absence of any kind of personal interaction, outside of the sex. Adam got the distinct impression that tenderness of any sort was strictly unwelcome, although there was something about the way Jade would touch him—a fluttering graze of his hand, maybe, a brush of his teeth across Adam’s neck, or the way he angled his head just so to expose a soft white throat—that Adam had noticed the last time they were together, that was new, that seemed portentous and imbued with meaning.

All in all, there had been seven such encounters. As far as Adam could discern, there was no pattern to them. Sometimes Jade would waylay him with a glance at the end of the work day, or brush a hand along the top of his cubicle wall as he walked to the copy room. And Adam, never sure if he was imagining the implicit invitation, would follow, heart in his throat, barely breathing, to the room with the copier and the door that stuck but did not lock, or a supply closet, or the men’s bathroom. They would fuck, soundless and urgent and quick as it was enduring, their tenuous privacy liable to detonate into swinging doors and shellshocked colleagues at any moment. Jade would gather himself and leave first, Adam staring at the buttons on his shirt and the laces of his shoes as he dressed himself, overcome with an exponentially strengthening desire to grab Jade by the chin and kiss him on the mouth, look into his eyes and explore with his tongue what they meant to each other, as if this was a secret Jade kept tucked in his cheek, just waiting to be discovered.

But Adam did not do this. Adam did not do this because sometimes, the weeks stretched thin without a single ambiguous gesture from the cubicle across the way, and Adam would lean back in his chair and grow half-hard just watching Jade’s silhouette, the sleeves of his jacket drifting softly a few inches off the ground. Each time, he was sure it was the last time. Day by day he convinced himself he’d imagined the whole thing.

He wondered if he was in love with Jade, but didn’t see how that could be. He didn’t know the first thing about Jade, except that he was sharp, that he was beautiful, that he cut deep—that these incisions, burning and buzzing in Adam’s chest cavity, this peeled torn flesh, it maybe _felt_ like it brushed his heart. But wounds itched, didn’t they, as they were healing? You weren’t meant to scratch them.

Adam’s breath caught in his throat, watching, as Jade swiveled back his chair a bit to reach for his phone, revealing the backs of his ears and neck, the spread of his shoulders and line of his back. It had been fifty-three days since they had fucked, early on a Tuesday morning, in the break room while the first pot of coffee brewed, sizzling and spitting. Adam had been shaky the rest of the day, raw and still feeling Jade in him, turning up his cuff to watch the imprints of Jade’s teeth fade from his wrist by lunchtime. The whole morning reminiscing on the bite that had left it there, the way lips had pursed on his pulse, hovering, the deliberate placement of crooked white teeth, the almost-accidental glance up the length of Adam’s arm, bright spikes of light through the fringe of overgrown bangs, just skimming the surface of Adam’s own—adoring—gaze.

The whole morning convincing himself he’d ask Jade to lunch, he’d just stand up and speak as Jade passed his cube, that this time he would say something, anything, so that he didn’t have to wait another week or hour or _minute_ to see those eyes again. But the moment came and he had frozen, choking low in his throat, watching paralyzed and sweating as Jade glided by, in a completely separate world Adam dared not penetrate.

So today, now, fifty-three days like a death knell, Jade hung up the phone. Adam’s spine snapped straight, suddenly, at attention. His knees locked. To no one’s surprise so much as his own, his chair shot back from his desk, taking his body with it, and he stood. Fifty-three days and what was there to lose? Breathing ragged, limbs jerky, Adam half hypnotized and half horrified to find his body _moving_ , crossing the carpet with all the gravity that such a Berlin Wall deserved. Creased leather toe of polished shoe nudging the threshold of that forbidden cubicle and freezing, volition draining away, leaving him granite and looming. Surely Jade would feel him there. His whole body was buzzing, trapped as in a spider’s web, unable to flee despite the desperate urgings of his sympathetic nervous system, so much wiser than the reptilian brain that had propelled him here.

And slowly, Jade swiveled again, turning this time away from his desk, towards Adam. Gratifying, surprise registered on his face. Adam saw for the first time the weariness there, the places on his cheeks where flesh pouched tender, darkening those proud bones with exhaustion.

And Adam, blurting. “Do you like football?”

Slowly, Jade’s eyes climbed and met Adam’s own. Slate and brittle and gleaming, but maybe what caught the light so well wasn’t splinters after all. Because, looking deeper, looking longer, Adam glimpsed something soft moving through, in the background. Something soft and weak and tired, tired of all that ice and snow.

“Because there’s a game on tonight,” Adam’s voice said, Adam’s lips brushing against each other and vibrating, only slightly, with the unexpected sound. Was there a game on tonight? He had no idea. Wondering what day it was, what month, what year. Remembering those teeth marks, fifty-three days past, and whether what motivated Jade to put them there was the same thing keeping him away now. Whether it was something soft, after all. Whether Jade would bend before breaking or, brittle and bright, would shatter all at once in Adam’s arms. Because he’d hold an armful of shards close to his chest, jagged pieces seeking red within, and brush his cheek through the glittering ice, drawing tears and blood alike, if that’s what he could have. If that’s what Jade would give him.

“We could order in,” Adam went on, voice beginning to fail, trailing weakly. “Do you like beer? Or wine, I have a bottle of red.” Jade looked back down again, not studying the carpet as if he were shy but simply breaking the gaze as if it had ended, disinterested and cool. Sweat began to gather on the back of Adam’s neck as his brain caught up with what he’d done, what he was doing, the words he was daring to speak. You couldn’t hold shards of glass. They would just cut you—pass on through. It was a body he was seeking, warm and smooth and Jade’s. Because fifty-three days was too many. Fifty-three too many. And it was stupid, it was sex, it was sex in bathrooms and public spaces, and the silence alone spoke to how little they had in common, so why would Jade be someone to eat take-out and drink wine with, in front of the game? Why would Jade be someone to love tenderly, in a goddamn bed for once, or to drape an arm over and share popcorn with? He wasn’t. He simply was not, and Adam had no reason to suppose he was.

“I’m sure you already have plans.” Adam’s voice, now, so audibly dejected he decided Jade was right to be so taciturn, decided he should never speak a word again. “It’s the weekend, this is last-minute, you’ve got better things to do.” He was muttering now, easing backwards slowly, to slink out of the room and into a hole, somewhere, where he would be free to absolutely just _die_ , either in a protracted painful agony or as a truncated blip, blinking from existence.

Jade’s eyes leapt up, arresting him. More than softness, there was a sudden fire in them—flames to lick and melt and warm, to caress. To dwindle down into a slow, gold heat at the very core, smoking and settling around Adam almost like arms.

“I don’t,” Jade said, his voice clearer and richer than Adam had been imagining it. He had thought it would be deeper, rough or complicated, a twisting grey. But it was mahogany instead, and telling, holding in it depth and warmth that nothing else about Jade had betrayed, except perhaps the perfidious freckles.

This time, Jade held his gaze, burning. Adam swallowed, hard, and prayed his voice wouldn’t come out as strangled and cracked as it felt in his mouth. “Great,” he managed, tones only a little bit strained. “I’ll give you my address.” He paused, words woefully insufficient to express the thousands of things they hadn’t yet said. And finally he settled on: “Is Chinese okay?”

Perhaps he was imagining things, or perhaps Jade’s lips really did rise in the corners, betraying the barest smirk. “Chinese would be great,” said Jade, in the longest utterance Adam had ever heard him make. He was pleased to hear the voice held much more than the words did, Adam included.  


End Notes:

My favorite part of this story is imagining what Jade has been thinking this whole time--how hard he must have been trying to restrain himself, to only reach for Adam when he couldn't bear it a second longer, how the Christmas party was a drunk mistake when he lost control and he's been too afraid to say anything in case Adam has hated him--he must have hated him, because they don't even make eye contact, do they--and is only interested in the sex, and he wishes he could stop but he can't, and he fucked it all up at the Christmas party and maybe they could have had something nice but now all they have is this and he's so, so worried that next time Adam won't follow him to the copy room, each time he's worried that it's done.

As you can see I've pretty much developed a whole narrative about it. Anyway. I hope you liked it!

Also, if anyone has a tumblr or a site or anything for we now-homeless AFI slashers to gather at, let me know about it! I miss you guys, even when we're not writing. I'm still here, at least in spirit.

Many thanks to Into Evernight for kicking my ass a little, in a very nice way, and getting me moving again.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8870>  



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